Remembering Refugee Childrenhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/08/remembering-refugee-children.html
Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.<p class="blog-tagline">Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by ORIT BASHKIN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9160e01970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9160e01970b" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9160e01970b-pi"><img alt="Iraqi_jews_displaced_1951-lrg" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9160e01970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9160e01970b-800wi" title="Iraqi_jews_displaced_1951-lrg" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9160e01970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9160e01970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Displaced Iraqi Jews, 1951. Public domain <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iraqi_jews_displaced_1951.jpg">via Wikimedia Commons</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>Between 1949 and 1951, some 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were denationalized by the Iraqi state migrated to Israel. These Jews, I suggest, were not native sons returning to their homeland, but rather immigrants arriving at a new location, where they encountered prejudice and discrimination. Most of them resided in transit camps, known as <em>Ma‘abarot</em>. Originally, these camps were perceived as sites in which Jewish migrants would stay for only a brief period of time, yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods (between one to seven years), living in tents, huts, and shacks where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, and neglect ran rampant.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94ca3970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94ca3970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 200px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25199"><img alt="Impossible Exodus" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94ca3970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94ca3970d-800wi" title="Impossible Exodus" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94ca3970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94ca3970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25199"><em>Impossible Exodus</em> »</a> tells the story of Iraqi Jews&#39; first decades in Israel, who, faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, engaged in various forms of resistance.</span></div>
</div>
<p>My book, <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=25199">Impossible Exodus</a></em>, sheds light on Iraqi Jewish life in the Ma‘abarot of Israel; on the communists and activists who participated in strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, on the Iraqi mothers who managed to get their children out of the cycle of poverty, and on the teachers who, without state permission, organized classes and schools. The most difficult chapter for me to write concerned Iraqi Jewish children, not only because these children were the fathers and mothers of childhood friends of mine but also because of the resonance of their experiences with those of current refugee children, Syrian and Yemenite in particular, who, like the Iraqi children whose history I was reconstructing, lost a sense of home and normalcy—and also because it is always difficult to write about the sufferings of the most helpless and vulnerable.</p>
<p>Indeed, the transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces. Mothers aborted because ambulances could not reach these camps. Mice, rats, and insects threatened the children&#39;s health. In Jerusalem, land mines were found in the vicinity of one camp. In 1954, a child living in the transit camp at Holon was killed when he was playing by a dunghill, and an old shell exploded. As families were living in tents and shacks and lighting was mainly in the form of oil lanterns and candles, these temporary houses caught fire. A two-year-old baby was burned alive in one such fire; there were no water tanks to put it out and no phone with which to call the fire department. Near Haifa, three children met with the same fate when their tent caught fire. They were raised by their widowed father, who tried to commit suicide twice after the tragedy.</p>
<p>Children who grew up in transit camps also describe how they enjoyed playing outside with their friends, conversing with them, and running about. Indeed, the creativity and imagination of these children alleviated the harsh circumstances. And yet, Iraqi Jewish families were broken apart when sons and daughters left for kibbutzim which offered better education; when fathers lived far away from their families in order to make a living; and especially when children watched their fathers and mothers suffer a decline in social status.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">State officials crippled the success of their own absorption project due to their stereotypes about the &quot;primitive&quot; nature of Iraqi families.</p>
<p>The Israeli state had an effect on the lives of these children. Since the state elites were socialist, they invested in measures to make sure that Iraqi children were educated and fed. A long battle was waged in the Knesset to guarantee that children would get a glass of milk per day in school. Local committees in the transit camps assisted the Ministry of Education in providing milk powder, sugar, and cacao to children. Teachers, social workers, soldiers, and doctors were sent to these camps. In truth, it was very difficult to find the resources to support the children; the state was extremely poor and all of its citizens lived under difficult austerity measures. But state officials crippled the success of their own absorption project due to their stereotypes about the &quot;primitive&quot; nature of Iraqi families and due to their dismissal of the sufferings of Iraqi Jews.</p>
<p>Israeli society was also divided on how to treat Iraqi children. On the one hand, large segments of society did come to their aid. Families that were themselves dealing with austerity measures took Iraqi Jewish children in, and volunteers and women’s organizations from across the political spectrum assisted the children and their families, especially during harsh winters. But the presence of a large number of poor immigrants also exposed the darkest side of Israeli society, as when employers took advantage of illegal teen and child labor.</p>
<p>My work on Iraqi Jews is also relevant to thousands of children and young adults living in Israel during the 1950s. While being a child in Israel at that time was not an easy matter for many, life was particularly difficult for those children whose parents were recent migrants to the state, whether from Iraq or elsewhere, and, of course, for those children whose parents were Palestinian. For instance, some 25,000 immigrant children, mostly Yemenite and North African, and 3,700 Palestinian children <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMp1tef4lg4">underwent dangerous radiation treatment</a> for ringworm disease. In Palestinian villages, children could not always access doctors because of severe limitations to their parent&#39;s freedom of movement; the results were deadly. Babies, mostly Yemenite, were snatched from their parents and given up for adoption. This past June, hundreds of parents, activists, and members of the second and third generation, <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Hundreds-cry-for-justice-as-fate-of-missing-children-remains-unsolved-497600">demanded state recognition</a>. A brave NGO called <a href="http://www.edut-amram.org/">AMRAM</a>, whose members set up an online archive of evidence of parents, played a crucial role in this venture.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94d1f970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94d1f970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94d1f970d-pi"><img alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-08-15/7dbf6c67-1d22-4413-aab9-6cc938f4bd19.png" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94d1f970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94d1f970d-800wi" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-08-15/7dbf6c67-1d22-4413-aab9-6cc938f4bd19.png" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94d1f970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b94d1f970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Yemenite Jews in <em>Ma‘abarot Rosh Ha-Ayin</em>, 1949. Public domain <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zoltan_Kluger_and_David_Eldan_-_Rosh_Ha-Ayin_1949.jpg">via Wikimedia Commons</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>While working on my book, my thoughts wandered between past and the present. I felt that Israelis and Jews in particular ought to know more about the 1950s, instead of being satisfied with rosy tales about Israel as a merry Jewish melting pot. Many more histories from the 1950s—from the histories of Bulgarian Jews settled in depopulated Jaffa to the fate of poor Palestinian children in the state of Israel—are yet to be told. The shift in Israel Studies from a type of global <em>hasbra</em> (propaganda) to a painful and genuine look at the state&#39;s past was happening while I was writing my book, and I am proud to be part of this historiographical shift. The present, however, lingers, as more and more refugees are being created, and as the pain of older refugees, Palestinians most notably, are still globally ignored. I hope that my readers, as they learn more about the Jewish children of Iraq, will think about the children of the present, who face similar, horrific, challenges. They deserve our attention and our compassion. &#0160;<br /><br /></p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=25199&amp;i=Introduction.html">Start Reading <em>Impossible Exodus</em> »<br /><br /></a></p>
<p class="author-bio">Orit Bashkin is Professor of Modern Middle East History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=20419&amp;bottom_ref=recommended">New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq</a></em>, <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=16152&amp;bottom_ref=recommended">The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq</a></em>, and most recently, <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=25199">Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel</a>.</em></p>HistoryJewish StudiesMiddle East StudiesStanford University Press2017-08-16T08:00:00-07:00Experiments in Digitalhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/08/experiments-in-digital.html
Our aim is to establish a platform for peer-reviewed, interactive, digital scholarship.
<p class="blog-tagline">Our aim is to establish a platform for peer-reviewed, interactive, digital scholarship.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by ALAN HARVEY</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b704bb970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b704bb970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b704bb970d-pi"><img alt="Experiments in digital" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b704bb970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b704bb970d-800wi" title="Experiments in digital" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b704bb970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b704bb970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Friederike Sundaram, Acquisitions Editor for digital humanities and computational social sciences, navigates&#0160;<a href="http://www.enchantingthedesert.com/home/"><em>Enchanting the Desert</em></a> by Nicholas Bauch in the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University.&#0160;<em>Enchanting the Desert</em>&#0160;(published in 2016) was the Press&#39;s <a href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2015/01/the-digital-pilot.html">first-ever born-digital publication</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>We are now two and a half years into our four-year experiment in digital publishing. Our goal, to establish a platform for the formal, peer-reviewed publication of scholarly works that are truly interactive, with no print counterpart, was an ambitious one, and the learning curve has been incredibly steep. But we’re now at the point where the lessons learned can be discussed in context and shared with the broader community.</p>
<p>We stepped into this experiment with the expectation that the primary difficulties would be technology-driven. Little did we know that much of the infrastructure we take for granted in the print world simply doesn’t exist within the digital. From the mechanics and processes of peer review, through the mundane aspects of copyright registration and library cataloguing, and on to the incredibly thorny issue of preservation, each step has been a challenge. And the challenge has been met across the Press, not simply by <a href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/06/meet-the-team.html">the four core team members</a> of <a href="http://sup.org/digital/">our Mellon-funded program</a>.</p>
<p>The supDigital blog, established last month by our Digital Production Associate, Jasmine Mulliken, as <a href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/digital-projects/">a subtopic of our main Press blog</a> and now <a href="http://blog.supdigital.org/">spun off here in its new home</a>, will be the primary forum for these discussions. We’re leading off this month with a video placing the program in context, and allowing four of our authors to elaborate on why this program is important to them.</p>
<p>We have a few more (shorter) videos up our sleeve that we will roll out over the coming months, and we invite you to watch out for regular postings, musings, and updates on the supDigital blog as our program accelerates.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="position: relative; height: 0; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gHls6hHo8gM?ecver=2" style="position: absolute; width: 100%; height: 100%; left: 0;" width="635"></iframe></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Alan Harvey (<a class="ProfileHeaderCard-screennameLink u-linkComplex js-nav" href="https://twitter.com/alanpharvey"><span class="username u-dir" dir="ltr">@<span class="u-linkComplex-target">alanpharvey</span></span></a>) is the Director of Stanford University Press. Arriving at the Press in 2002 as Deputy Director and Editor-in-Chief, Harvey oversaw much of the Press’s evolution toward digital formats and print-on-demand delivery.</p>Digital ProjectsStanford Press NewsStanford University Press2017-08-08T07:28:40-07:00Hands Outstretchedhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/08/hands-outstretched.html
Sociology is driven by human interaction and a desire for social good.<p class="blog-tagline">Sociology is driven by human interaction and a desire for social good.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by MARCELA MAXFIELD</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29cebc2970c" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29cebc2970c photo-full " style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29cebc2970c-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29cebc2970c image-full img-responsive" title="Camino de Santiago in Logroño" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29cebc2970c-800wi" alt="Camino de Santiago in Logroño" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29cebc2970c" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29cebc2970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">The scallop shell emblem in a street along the Camino de Santiago in Logroño, Spain. CC BY-SA 4.0 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camino_de_Santiago_en_Logro%C3%B1o.JPG">via Wikimedia Commons</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Just before joining Stanford University Press this past February, I decided to take the trip of a lifetime. I booked my ticket to Bordeaux, and plotted the route by bus and train to St. Jean Pied-de-Port—a small, medieval French town at the foot of the Pyrenees and famed starting point of the traditional pilgrimage across northern Spain, the Camino de Santiago. Six weeks from that point, I arrived at the lighthouse at the end of the world, in Finisterre.</p>
<p>For a trip so destination-oriented, the Camino had a strange muddling effect on any notions I had about the trajectory of my life. I had been working in publishing in New York City for four years before deciding that I would prefer to join the ranks of academics whose books I was helping to publish. That was the plan, at any rate, when I started across the mountain range that first day. I would spend my time contemplating my program of study in the days to follow, trekking among the vineyards, over highways, and through austere farming villages.</p>
<p>But instead of thinking about what academic track would make the most sense for me, I was distracted by the people around me—walking archives of tragedy, humor, nostalgia, and empathy—some of whom became like family to me for that relatively short span of time, and others with whom I interacted only once, maybe with just a passing smile. But even in those cases, their stories often wound back to me in the words of others. Over soup in a hostel one night I was asked, “Did you hear about the 87-year-old woman from New Zealand who is walking the Camino alone?” A face surfaced in my memory, smiling at me from underneath her pink knit hat as we waited in line for coffee, weeks ago. “She told me that her family is moving her into a nursing home next year and won’t let her travel on her own any more after this. She plans to throw her boots into the ocean at the end.”</p>
<p class="large-quote">Sociology’s terrain is vast and varied—possibly personified by the pilgrim stopping into a hostel and finding kinship among strangers.</p>
<p></p>
<p><br />I’ve heard that some of the best editors are those who thought they would only do the job for a few years, but can’t stop themselves from coming back. The Camino is said to have a similar effect, calling people back throughout their lives. My theory is that the reason for this may in fact be the same: addiction to the lessons different people can teach—and the hunger to learn as many of them as you can. There are so many good stories out there, and the thrill of recognizing one, cherishing it, cultivating it, sharing it, watching others experience the same thrill as they get told the story for the first time—once you realize that is what you love, it is impossible to feel completely contented with anything else.</p>
<p>Sociology is unique in affording this privilege perhaps more overtly than other disciplines. Topically, sociology’s terrain is vast and varied—possibly personified by the pilgrim stopping into a hostel and finding kinship among strangers, and leaving the next day with a completely different group, forming new bonds, and coming away with different lessons. Human interaction is an intrinsic theme of sociological study—be it on an individual or institutional level. And at its core is usually a social justice component, much in the same way that the pilgrim’s emblem is a scallop shell symbolizing a hand outstretched, ready to perform good deeds.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Human interaction is an intrinsic theme of sociological study and at its core is usually a social justice component.</p>
<p><br>The theme for this year’s ASA conference is inequality, and its relevance to current events is quite painfully obvious. The multiple panels discussing how to survive our current political realities make plain the linkages between this field and the world we live in. At a recent conference on inequality I heard a scholar say, “We created these problems, so we must be able to solve them.” This mantra is infused into so much of the research going on now, as exemplified by Stanford’s own series in Social Inequality, with <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/series/?series=Studies%20in%20Social%20Inequality">published and forthcoming titles</a> that confront head on the fraught landscape we live in today. I’m so happy to be able to work on books with such immediate resonance to the wider world; books that recover the experiences of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24290">transnational migrants</a> and <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28631">their families</a>, books that <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26746">expose systemic inequities</a>, including <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26165">in places we might not otherwise think to look</a>, and books that look to <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26599">past events</a> and <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27615">across the globe</a> to understand <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22421">how people participate in the world around them</a>.</p>
<p>I came back from one long journey and found myself immediately embarking on another, in many ways more life altering, one. As with the former, I’m eager to learn the lessons you all have to teach, and to help you tell your stories to others. I hope you’ll forgive this somewhat forced metaphor from a book editor searching for the narrative arc.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Marcela Maxfield is the Acquisitions Editor in sociology and Asian studies at Stanford University Press. Before coming to SUP, she worked in editorial at Oxford University Press.</p>SociologyStanford Press NewsStanford University Press2017-08-07T05:00:00-07:00Making a Home for the Disappearedhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/08/making-a-home-for-the-disappeared.html
As the Peruvian state uncovers mass graves, relatives find ways to honor their missing loved ones.<p class="blog-tagline">As the Peruvian state uncovers mass graves, relatives find ways to honor their missing loved ones.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by ISAIAS ROJAS-PEREZ</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b4d7f6970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b4d7f6970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b4d7f6970d-pi"><img alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-08-01/bf87c6d7-e747-4000-92ba-9da431b490a9.png" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b4d7f6970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b4d7f6970d-800wi" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-08-01/bf87c6d7-e747-4000-92ba-9da431b490a9.png" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b4d7f6970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b4d7f6970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Photo taken by the author at the Museo de la Memoria, Para que no se Repita, established in Ayacucho by ANFASEP (Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos, y Desaparecidos del Perú).</span></div>
</div>
<p>An enlarged identity card photo of a boy wearing his school uniform alongside one of his class notebooks are among some of the most moving artifacts displayed at the <a href="http://anfasep.org.pe/museo-de-la-memoria/">Museo de la Memoria</a>—the small museum that the Quechua-speaking mothers of the disappeared built in memory of their missing relatives in Ayacucho, Peru. The notebook displays what could be the work of any Quechua-speaking boy in a Spanish-speaking state institution such as the school: the unsteady lettering, the misspellings and grammatical errors, the playful drawings. It is the work of a joyful boy preparing to enter into adult society and the political community by mastering the state’s writing and reading practices. But at midnight on June 24, 1984, a military squad burst into his house and kidnapped him. He was never seen again. Only his class notebook and the enlarged identity card photo remain.</p>
<p>Pablo Gerardo Albites Pariona is one of the thousands of people “disappeared” by the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru’s central southern Andes. In August 2003, at the end of its mandate, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) compiled a preliminary list of four thousand “disappeared” people. In 2011, another state-sponsored institution, the Central Register of Victims, registered 8,661 cases. Yet, as the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances observed as recently as July 2016, the real figure may be much higher. Citing such institutions as the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, the UN Working Group considers that figure “to lie between thirteen thousand and sixteen thousand victims of enforced disappearance.” According to Peruvian human rights organizations, the actual figure may be as high as eighteen thousand disappeared.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced.</p>
<p><br />While the UN Working Group has rightly called for the need to reconcile these figures by means of centralizing the information that these institutions hold, the numbers gesture towards the enormity of a particular form of violence that was visited upon thousands of mostly poor, Andean families, during Peru’s internal war. They speak to how, despite being a democracy, Peru joined the ranks of military dictatorships in the region, like Argentina and Guatemala, which waged campaigns of state terror against civilian populations in order to confront leftist militants. Yet abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced. In several respects, the disappearance of their relatives was for them an unprecedented world-ending event. They experienced firsthand how the state can kill with impunity and also how human bodies “disappear” at the snap of the state’s fingers whenever the state sees itself as being under threat.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29c31aa970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29c31aa970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26585"><img alt="Mourning Remains" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29c31aa970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29c31aa970c-800wi" title="Mourning Remains" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29c31aa970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29c31aa970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26585">Mourning Remains »</a> examines the attempts to find, recover, and identify the bodies of Peruvians who were disappeared during the 1980s and 1990s.</span></div>
</div>
<p>I recorded several of these individual stories of terror and suffering during the time I worked as a professional human rights activist in Peru, between 1987 and 2001. I also routinely wrote about the Peruvian authorities’ practices of denial, impunity, and their callous unwillingness to respond to the plight of Andean relatives of the dead and disappeared. The refusal on the part of the state to acknowledge this dark history was supposed to change with the emergence of a new democratic regime following the late-2000 collapse of former President Alberto Fujimori’s rule. In direct opposition to a politics of impunity and oblivion characteristic of the previous two decades of internal war, the new regime adopted a broad project of accountability, memory, recognition, reparation, and institutional reform as a means of coming to terms with the legacy of mass violence, unjust death, and unspeakable atrocity. This project established a truth commission, animated the prosecution of human rights crimes, and began the process of exhuming mass graves to identify the dead and to search for the disappeared.&#0160;</p>
<p>Like other members of the Peruvian human rights community, I was enthusiastic about these transitional justice initiatives at the time. But I was particularly hopeful about the impact that the official search for the disappeared through forensic exhumations would have for Andean families such as Pablo Gerardo’s. I knew that finding their missing loved ones had been their central demand for justice. And now, for the first time in two decades, they would have a chance to cast light on the whereabouts of the disappeared, perhaps recover their remains, and be given the opportunity to offer their loved ones a proper burial. In fact, the first demand that Andean survivors and relatives placed on the CVR was to conduct exhumations in former war-torn areas of rural Peru.</p>
<p>Recovering the disappeared through exhumations has proven to be a daunting task. Citing official sources, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance reported that between 2002 and January 2016, a total of 3,410 bodies were recovered. Of these, 1,973 bodies were identified and 1,804 were returned to their families. However, about half of the identified bodies belonged to victims of summary execution—meaning their identities were already known or presumed. The other half, about 986 bodies, belonged to victims of forced disappearance properly speaking. This means that in more than a decade of exhumations, only a tiny percentage (about 6 percent) of the presumed sixteen thousand disappeared has been recovered and returned to their relatives. These results indicate the complexity of the problem. Recovering human remains scattered throughout the formidable Andean landscape is an overwhelming task. But one of the main reasons for the failure is that in many cases the victims’ bodies were shattered beyond recognition, making their postmortem individualization and identification impossible.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">Recovering the disappeared through exhumations has proven to be a daunting task.</p>
<p>One such a case concerns the military fortress of Los Cabitos, the regional headquarters of the counterinsurgency in Peru’s central southern Andes. The CVR concluded that this fortress, located in the Andean city of Ayacucho, had been a major center of detention, torture, and disappearance of suspected “terrorists” during Peru’s “war on terror.” In early 2009, the Public Prosecutor’s Office completed a six-year forensic investigation at the fortress’s former training and shooting field known as La Hoyada, in which the authorities uncovered dozens of mass graves containing the remains of an unknown number of the disappeared. The forensic experts unearthed 109 bodies (about half of them were complete skeletons and the rest were partial remains) along with an uncountable amount of ashes and burned fragments of human bones. The authorities also uncovered the foundations of industrial-style furnaces where the bodies of the victims had been incinerated, presumably so that no trace of them could ever be found. A former director of the Legal Medicine Institute said that probably more than one thousand people had been disappeared at the site.</p>
<p>Thus, in the legal search for the disappeared, the forensic investigation at Los Cabitos uncovered evidence demonstrating that some practices of state terror resulted in something resembling what Hannah Arendt called a “fabrication of corpses,” referring to the factory-like production of mass death in Nazi concentration camps. The resemblance lies not just in the fact that mass killing took place on a bureaucratic site or in the methods used to dispose of the bodies of the victims. Rather, the primary resemblance lies in the kind of death that the Peruvian military inflicted upon perceived transgressors of the sovereign’s rule. At Los Cabitos not only were individuals’ lives taken away anonymously but their deaths and the memory of their deaths were also eliminated. The victims were subjected to forms of asocial death—death without mourning, rituals of remembrance, and even grief—death “robbed of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life,” as Arendt put it.</p>
<p>Quechua mothers of the disappeared, such as Pablo Gerardo’s, participated in the forensic procedures at Los Cabitos as plaintiffs, in the agonizing hope that they would finally be able to find their missing loved ones’ remains. They must now confront the truth that what remains of the disappeared is mostly ashes and burned fragments of human bones. Yet this truth of atrocity has not led these mothers to paralysis and surrender. Rather, in response to the failed promise of the law and forensic sciences, they have attempted to bring the disappeared back into the human community in a collective gesture of mourning that weaves together materiality, biography, and nonhuman agency through everyday practices and technologies of self and truth. By means of retellings, rituals, dreams, singing, and memorialization, the mothers of the disappeared have endeavored to redraw the ontological boundaries between life and death, and thus rearrange senses of community, belonging, authority, and the human, in the aftermath of atrocity. In doing so, they have reclaimed death as human experience in a powerful response to the state’s “fabrication of corpses.” This response to the legacy of state terror also unsettles, and becomes an alternative to, the state’s project of securing the future of the body politic by means of governing past atrocity through the rational means of the law, science, and modern politics.<br /><br /></p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=26585&amp;i=Excerpt%20from%20the%20Introduction.html">Start reading <em>Mourning Remains</em> »<br /></a></p>
<p class="author-bio">Isaias Rojas-Perez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-Newark and author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26585"><em>Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes</em></a><em>.</em></p>AnthropologyLatin American StudiesStanford University Press2017-08-03T08:00:00-07:00Transcending Without Transcendencehttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/08/unparalleled-werner-hamacher.html
A tribute to extraordinary scholar and Meridian series editor, Werner Hamacher (1948–2017).<p class="blog-tagline">A tribute to extraordinary scholar and Meridian series editor, Werner Hamacher.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29bc224970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29bc224970c" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29bc224970c-pi"><img alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-08-01/28941dbb-6ebf-4c8a-b1b7-a2cc9553965f.png" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29bc224970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29bc224970c-800wi" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-08-01/28941dbb-6ebf-4c8a-b1b7-a2cc9553965f.png" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29bc224970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29bc224970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Select titles from <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/series/?series=Meridian:%20Crossing%20Aesthetics">the Meridian series</a>. Photo by Kalie Caetano.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>It was with the heaviest of hearts that Stanford University Press learned of the death of Meridian series editor Werner Hamacher this past month. Professor at the University of Frankfurt, and founder of its Institute of General and Comparative Literary Studies, which he also directed, Hamacher was also the Emmanuel Levinas Chair and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at The European Graduate School.</p>
<p>SUP’s collaboration with Werner Hamacher dates back to 1991, when he and series co-founder <a href="https://german.uchicago.edu/faculty/wellbery">David Wellbery</a> (who served as co-editor until 2000) reached out to former Stanford editor Helen Tartar with the idea of forming a book series that would be a forum for work in literary and aesthetic theory, particularly that being done in France, Germany, and the United States. The series name was meant to pay homage to Paul Celan and his influential poetological statement of the same name, which was eventually published in <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1236">a prizewinning translation</a> in the series itself; but it equally referenced the editors’ desire to cross geographical meridians, to privilege internationality, and to foster work that remapped connections between disciplines, institutions, and national traditions.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Werner’s acumen as a series editors was unparalleled.</p>
<p><br /><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/series/?series=Meridian:%20Crossing%20Aesthetics">The Meridian series</a> went on to become one of the most prestigious and respected book series in the humanities, publishing numerous luminaries in English translation as well as Anglophone thinkers from around the world. Intentionally, and generously, the work of younger, as yet unknown figures was featured alongside and in conversation with books by Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Lühmann, Maurice Blanchot, Bernard Steigler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben. As Wellbery has put it, “The only criterion was a commitment to the seriousness of literature and art.” To date, 122 books have appeared in print and there are more on the way. Indeed, it is a source of some sadness that Werner will not be here to see some of the forthcoming projects he endorsed.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b46354970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b46354970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 190px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b46354970d-pi"><img alt="Pleroma" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b46354970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b46354970d-800wi" title="Pleroma" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b46354970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b46354970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2149"><em>Pleroma</em> »</a> traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel&#39;s thought into his mature works.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Werner’s acumen as a series editors was unparalleled. Indeed, he stood out as the most discriminating series editor a press could ask for. He often tormented himself over his rigorous standards and his inability to give certain things a pass, but such meticulousness is what made his series stand out and his opinion so valuable. Humanities editor Emily-Jane Cohen, who worked with him for over a decade, has singled Werner out as a series editor who read every word of what appeared in his series. Not surprisingly, then, a sign of approval and engagement from him, and of course, welcome into the Meridian series, has always seemed to be especially meaningful for the authors Werner helped to foster and showcase. And then, of course, there is his own work, some of which was also featured in Meridian. Werner’s areas of interest included philology, law, and politics, and student of Derrida that he was, he was particularly known for his deconstructive readings, of which <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2149"><em>Pleroma</em></a>, his book on Hegel, is a prime example.</p>
<p>In the last weeks, a range of biographies and eulogies have appeared across the web, and from a variety of corners. Having taught for many years in the United States as well, Werner left behind a number of American colleagues and students. Those wishing to know more about this extraordinary scholar and his important contributions may wish to refer to obituaries that appeared in venues attesting to his impact, including, in Germany, <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/geisteswissenschaften/nachruf-auf-werner-hamacher-15098738.html">the <em>Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung</em></a> and <a href="http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/nachruf-sprache-ist-abschied-1.3581135">the <em>Süddeutsche Zeitung</em></a>. Jean-Luc Nancy published a touching tribute in French in <a href="https://diacritik.com/2017/07/20/jean-luc-nancy-hommage-a-werner-hamacher-am-siebzehnten-juli-2017/"><em>Diacritik</em></a>. For its part, SUP has collected some comments from some of the Meridian authors closest to Werner, which we are posting below. We are grateful to them for having shared these thoughts, and most of all, we are grateful to Werner for all the years he devoted to us and to the Meridian series, which left a lasting mark and which figures so importantly in the scholarly landscape.</p>
<p class="ellipsis">...</p>
<p>“Who, in his wake, will have Werner Hamacher’s ability to invent and yoke concepts not only for the love of theory, but above all, to illuminate an author’s work, an obscure page, or a verse in an unexpected flash? And how can we forget the exigent gesture of his prose, in which rigor and imagination, philology and philosophy, seem almost to merge? We all owe him a debt, though the importance of his work has yet to be fully determined.”</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">GIORGIO AGAMBEN</span>, author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28469">Homo Sacer</a></em></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">&#0160;</p>
<p>“Two generations of Germanists and Comp Lit scholars forged themselves in the furnace of Werner Hamacher’s seminars in Baltimore and later in Frankfurt. There was something about that transatlantic fire that wanted to be very pure. In a word, Hamacher was uncompromising. He played deconstruction’s super-ego, never missed a chance to say ‘no’ to certain interpretations and to certain kinds of thinking. He even developed a critical rhetoric of the no, the not, nothing, and the ‘a-,’ out of singular readings of Hegel, Hölderlin, Benjamin, and Celan. There was also something infernal about those seminars—deconstructing the canon, renouncing the prevailing understanding, calling understanding itself into question. For some, Hamacher will always live in their intellectual conscience. At the decisive moment, he wrinkles his brow and says, as he once did to me, ‘You need more obstacles.’”</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">PAUL NORTH</span>, Yale University, author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25285"><em>The Yield</em></a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">&#0160;</p>
<p>“I am proud to have been a part of [the Meridian series] and am grateful to Werner Hamacher for those many years of collaboration.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">DAVID WELLBERY</span>, University of Chicago, Meridian series co-founder, and author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2377"><em>The Specular Moment</em></a></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>“When I first entered into Werner’s seminar at Hopkins, I realized that, despite four years in college and two in graduate school, this was the first time I ever encountered a teacher—someone whose voice in the classroom was completely absorbed in the rhythms of argumentation. This voice, rigorous yet kindly, has been with me ever since. And as long as I am able to read and listen, it will continue to be my companion.”</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">PETER FENVES</span>, Northwestern University, author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=12011"><em>The Messianic Reduction</em></a></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>“Werner Hamacher: the works associated with that authorial name are a thinking with and thinking against, as they open up our modes of knowing and not knowing; a call to and response to...; what he named both the ‘act of searching itself’ and a ‘catastrophe of questioning.’&#0160;It is impossible to overestimate the daring and almost carefree exuberance of his written performances and the astonishment and wonder they create for the reader. The writings of Werner Hamacher have long served as something of a touchstone for students of literature and philosophy. While he taught in the United States they traveled hundreds of miles to hear him speak and sit in his classes. When he returned to Germany, a new generation of extraordinary students crossed the ocean for that privilege. Those of us who knew him long and knew him well came to value his remarkable capacity for friendship and his amazing generosity. There are no words…”</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">CAROL JACOBS</span>, Yale University, author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=11763">Skirting the Ethical</a></em></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>“Werner Hamacher’s work has been an utterly uncompromising initiation into questioning in reading and in thinking: questioning ‘that does not end with a question mark,’ as he once wrote, that does not claim to know what the answer is or pretend to be it itself, and that, holding out a space for what is unsaid, makes learning—another learning—possible.”</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN</span>, Princeton University, translator of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2003"><em>Homo Sacer</em></a>, <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=302"><em>Potentialities</em></a>, and <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=883"><em>The End of the Poem</em></a></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>“After Werner Hamacher’s much too early death, few writers seem to say more about his preoccupations than Friedrich Hölderlin. Not known for his puns, Hölderlin allowed himself one in his meditation on communion, ‘Brod und Wein’ (“Bread and Wine’), which reads differently after Werner’s demise. In the fourth stanza, Hölderlin apostrophizes <em>Vater Äther!</em>, ‘Father Aether!,’ and then, four lines later, speaks of <em>Vater! heiter!</em>, ‘Father! Joyful!’ The difference at play is the very one wrought by the poem: that of aspiration, signaling life and marked by the letter that German speakers pronounce <em>ha</em>. As few others, Werner knew how to breathe life into texts—he was, if another wordplay may be permitted, quite literally, <em>ein</em> <em>Ha-macher</em>, an “H-maker.” Henceforth Werner’s own texts will need to be addressed with the same blissful—unswerving and unending—scrutiny he devoted to those of others. Saddened by his death, I am certain he would like nothing more than that we, his readers, cultivate Hölderlin’s joyfulness.”</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">ARIS FIORETOS</span>, Södertörn University, author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=924"><em>The Gray Book</em></a></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>“Werner Hamacher: Transcending without transcendence. This is the movement he has imparted to us. Thanks to the Meridian series, we can continue to read in his wake.”</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">—<span style="color: #800000;">SUSAN BERNSTEIN</span>, Brown University, author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=12128"><em>Housing Problems</em></a></p>Stanford Press NewsStanford University Press2017-08-01T08:27:03-07:00Tracking Changes in Digital Publishinghttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/tracking-changes-in-digital-publishing.html
Copy editors of digital scholarship must take into account the medium of the project.<p class="blog-tagline">Copy editors of digital scholarship must take into account the medium of the project.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by JASMINE MULLIKEN</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9112d71970b" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9112d71970b photo-full " style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9112d71970b-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9112d71970b image-full img-responsive" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-31/e3b58de9-c392-4018-9548-c162e7e7bd3b.png" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9112d71970b-800wi" alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-31/e3b58de9-c392-4018-9548-c162e7e7bd3b.png" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9112d71970b" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c9112d71970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Photo by Rodger Evans. CC BY-ND 2.0 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/">via Flickr</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>A digital publishing program like ours, which prides itself on being platform agnostic, offers exciting potential for variety in the look and feel of final publication formats but also ensures that some of the production processes typical within a press can never be completely standardized.</p>
<p><a href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/making-space-for-digital-publications.html">As I mentioned last week</a> and will write more about in the future, we have a responsibility to host the projects we publish, and while that hosting environment might be centralized, the process of migrating a project there from its development environment is very much determined by its underlying structure. There isn’t a set of steps we can apply to all the projects in the production pipeline because each project requires a different approach.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">The process of copyediting a project must take into account the format and structure of the project.</p>
<p>Likewise, the process of copyediting a project must take into account the format and structure of the project. SUP, like any other established press, has a pretty streamlined process for this stage of production when it comes to books. Page counts normally indicate a ballpark timeframe for how long copyediting will take, and most professional copy editors are already familiar with the file types they’ll be working with. They are presumed to know how to leverage the affordances of basic software like Microsoft Word to manage and track their work. In other words, in most cases, a trained copy editor with a knowledge or specialization in the subject area knows exactly how to handle a manuscript and get the job done.</p>
<p>But what happens when the manuscript has been composed in an online publishing platform like Scalar, Drupal, or Wordpress rather than with traditional word processing software? What if the “page” count ranges anywhere from three hundred to two thousand? What is a page, anyway? Is it only something that contains human-readable text or that has a unique url attached to it? Is it anything with an html or txt extension? And if we’re shifting from the idea of <em>a page</em> to <em>a file</em>, does it include source code files? To what extent should a source code file be edited? Should this be part of the copyediting process? Or is this process already worked into the project’s development by the author and her team of programmers? Even if source code should be part of the copyediting purview, where do you find trained copy editors with expertise in both the project’s subject area and also in whatever programming language the author and her developers have chosen for the project?</p>
<p>These are questions publishers of web-based interactive scholarly works will need to address, and they’re the ones I’m contemplating this week as I begin planning for an upcoming publication’s copyediting phase.</p>
<p class="large-quote">A good copy editor has experience and knows a book’s subject area... The digital copy editor needs to have a certain level of digital literacy as well.</p>
<p><br />The reality is that we’re still probably several decades away from a time when we have available a diverse pool of trained copy editors fluent in JavaScript, HTML, PHP, and several major publishing platforms, as well as Middle East studies or philosophy or southwest American geospatial history. So in the meantime, we necessarily need to start with the basics.</p>
<p>A good copy editor has experience and knows a book’s subject area. A good copy editor for a digital project should be no different. But at the very least, the digital copy editor needs to have a certain level of digital literacy as well. The ability to work directly within a platform like Scalar is a valuable skill. A copy editor with experience in web design or blogging will likely have the ability to adapt to a variety of environments like those used for the projects we’re publishing. This means aspiring copy editors should familiarize themselves with these platforms and be comfortable working in applications beyond the basic Microsoft Word.</p>
<p>Of course working directly within the digital publication environment means that editors must track changes themselves. We are currently at work on devising a system for our copy editors by which they can make changes directly within the platform or content files but keep track of those changes outside the platform since, for now, such a feature isn’t quite fully developed within the typical web publishing environment. While Scalar is considering and developing a copyediting function for its platform, most other systems, including custom-coded ones, aren’t built with professional or academic publishers’ workflows in mind. Copyediting is a necessity in a program that delivers quality, peer-reviewed scholarship, so as authoring-platform organizations continue to develop new applications and improve on existing ones, we hope that they will consider the growing need for features that scholars and publishers want in digital modes of scholarly communication.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Jasmine Mulliken (<a href="https://twitter.com/jasminemulliken">@jasminemulliken</a>) is Digital Production Associate at Stanford University Press. She coordinates the production and workflow of born-digital projects, including recommending platforms and coding standards to authors, consulting with authors on projects’ technical attributes, and evaluating best practices for archiving and preservation.</p>Digital ProjectsStanford University Press2017-07-31T12:06:00-07:00Is He a Sociopath?http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/is-he-a-sociopath.html
Why the principal question we ask about Bernie Madoff is wrong.<p class="blog-tagline">Why the principal question we ask about Bernie Madoff is wrong.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by COLLEEN EREN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b20ef9970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b20ef9970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b20ef9970d-pi"><img alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-24/0d729b79-3932-48d6-b7e9-a41663e863cd.png" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b20ef9970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b20ef9970d-800wi" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-24/0d729b79-3932-48d6-b7e9-a41663e863cd.png" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b20ef9970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09b20ef9970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Bernard Madoff, painted portrait by Thierry Ehrmann. CC BY 2.0 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/home_of_chaos/3612816099/in/photostream/">via Flickr</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>In May, HBO’s <a href="http://www.hbo.com/movies/the-wizard-of-lies"><em>The Wizard of Lies</em></a> brought in the largest premiere audience that the network has seen in four years. The film, an adaptation of Diana Henriques’ journalistic account of Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, saw, <a href="http://deadline.com/2017/05/wizard-of-lies-hbo-premiere-ratings-madoff-movie-1202100882/">2.4 million viewers</a>, the weekend of its release—a sizable audience, especially considering that actors Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner headlined <a href="http://abc.go.com/shows/madoff"><em>Madoff</em></a><em>, </em>a four-hour ABC miniseries on the same subject, only a year prior. Perhaps as a way to seize upon the renewed interest generated by the film, which cast Robert De Niro in the lead role as Bernie and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff, the <em>New York Post </em>ran a lengthy article, “<a href="http://nypost.com/2017/05/14/the-sad-new-life-of-exiled-ruth-madoff/">The sad new life of exiled Ruth Madoff</a>,” with paparazzi-style photos of Ruth, her preferred bagel shop, dry cleaners, local clothing shop, and other quotidian details about a no-longer-privileged existence. The UK’s <em>Daily Mail </em><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4650690/Reclusive-Ruth-Madoff-spotted-shopping.html">published a similar story</a> with photos of the “recluse” Ruth emerging from a local CVS. With a distinct note of schadenfreude, the piece indicated just how far down the social ladder she had fallen. With the ten-year anniversary of Bernie’s arrest approaching, public appetite for this story and curiosity about its principal characters remains robust.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Whether or not Madoff fits the criteria of a sociopath (or a psychopath) has produced numerous conjectures.</p>
<p><br />One question, in particular, seems to sustain the fascination: Is Bernie Madoff a sociopath? Indeed, in <em>The Wizard of Lies</em>’ closing scene, Madoff (De Niro) asks Diana Henriques a question with which the film concludes, leaving the viewers to answer for themselves: “Do you think I’m a sociopath?” Whether or not Madoff fits the criteria of a sociopath (or a psychopath) has produced numerous conjectures. <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/richard-dreyfuss-bernie-madoff-180957679/">Actor Richard Dreyfuss claimed</a>, “[he] is a sociopath and that’s a very distinctive thing [from a psychopath]. He never once thinks of, considers, even frames an image of his victims.” Dreyfuss would later admit he didn’t know the “medical definition” of either term. De Niro, asked the same question on a press tour, <a href="http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/wizard-of-lies-robert-de-niro-1201960665/">hedged</a>: “What he did is beyond my comprehension. So there’s a disconnect somehow that I still would like to understand.” Experts have weighed in as well. In <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/03/02/is_bernie_madoff_a_sociopath/">an interview with <em>Salon</em></a> titled, “Is Bernie Madoff a Sociopath?” Brown Professor of psychology Peter Kramer, after much qualification, noted his suspicion that, “in these cases where things go very, very wrong, the obvious diagnosis remains the likely one.” Harvard Professor Eugene Soltes notes in his book <a href="http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/why-they-do-it/9781610395366"><em>Why They Do It</em></a><em>,</em> “to a psychiatrist, Madoff displays many symptoms associated with psychopathy. His lack of remorse, failure to take responsibility, inability to plan ahead, and persistent deceitfulness all contribute to such a designation.”</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2991f77970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2991f77970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 200px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2991f77970c-pi"><img alt="Bernie Madoff and the Crisis" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2991f77970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2991f77970c-800wi" title="Bernie Madoff and the Crisis" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2991f77970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2991f77970c">Bernie Madoff and the Crisis » locates Madoff within a broader reckoning about free market capitalism.</div>
</div>
<p>As a sociologist, I am unable to offer a professional diagnosis. But my own sustained conversations with Bernie Madoff over the past five years during his incarceration, included in my new book, <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25123">Bernie Madoff and the Crisis: The Public Trial of Capitalism</a>, </em>have also made me the target of questions about Madoff’s psychology, most recently for a Planète Justice documentary. Among the characteristics of sociopathic behavior are a list of factors including superficial charm, lack of remorse, unreliability, poor judgment, untruthfulness, pathological egocentricity, and failure to follow any life plan. I and others can offer our conjectures as to whether Madoff falls on the spectrum of sociopathy. I can certainly point to evidence of pathological egocentricity and deceitfulness in our interactions. But I can also point to what I perceive to be genuine remorse and pain experienced by Madoff over the loss of his sons and the way in which his Ponzi impacted them. There is ample room for ambivalence and debate. But, even if psychiatrists could offer conclusive diagnoses, this line of inquiry misses the much larger story about what the decades-long “success” of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and the disaster left behind in its aftermath. By focusing on Bernie’s condition, we miss our social condition. Put another way, we completely overlook the socio-political milieu that could incubate such massive fraud.</p>
<p>The continued focus on Madoff’s psychology and its relationship to his massive con has most recently led to <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-is-a-worse-crook-than-bernie-madoff/">comparisons between him and Donald Trump</a>. Republican strategist and CNN contributor Ana Navarro tweeted on July 4, 2017, “I wouldn’t be surprised if more Americans trust Bernie Madoff than Trump.” An op-ed in <em>MarketWatch </em>argued “<a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-donald-trump-is-the-bernie-madoff-of-politics-2016-07-21">Why Donald Trump is the Bernie Madoff of Politics</a>,” while the <em>Nation</em> ran a piece alleging, “<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-is-a-worse-crook-than-bernie-madoff/">Donald Trump is a worse crook than Bernie Madoff</a>.” Former labor secretary, Robert Reich, <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/02/08/robert-reich-tech-companies-donald-trump/">described Trump’s behavior as sociopathic</a>, while Trump’s ghostwriter for <em>The Art of the Deal </em><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all">said that, were he writing the book today, he would change the title</a> to <em>The Sociopath</em>. Do you see a pattern?</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">I wouldn&#39;t be surprised if more Americans trust Bernie Madoff than trust Donald Trump. <a href="https://t.co/WuL7WplOh1">https://t.co/WuL7WplOh1</a></p>
— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) <a href="https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/882321378690707456">July 4, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>In focusing on the individual “sociopath,” “devil,” or “monster,” we often lose sight of underlying systemic issues that enable heinous behavior. One of the central insights of my book is that the Madoff case became a proxy for talking about structural problems, such as financial deregulation, risk management failures, widespread fraud on mortgage loans, and so on, which precipitated the financial crisis of 2007-2009. And yet, the crash is a crisis in which Madoff played no part; his fraud was exposed as a <em>result</em> of it! Because of our deeply felt cultural longing to seek an individualist explanation for widespread social problems, his own guilt represented the guilt of the entire system, and produced a sense of vindication for all the wrongs that led to the crisis when “we” sent him to prison for 150 years.</p>
<p>Yet, Madoff’s incarceration in Butner Federal Correctional Institution, and his status as a pop culture reference—all of which focuses on him as an individual—has masked the fact that changes which could guard against another financial crisis, another Ponzi scheme of that scale, are not sufficiently in place.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">We often lose sight of underlying systemic issues that enable heinous behavior.</p>
<p>In fact, if any tie-in between Trump and Madoff should be made, it is that Trump has said he wants to do a “big number on Dodd-Frank,” the 2010 act that is meant to curb some of the real abuses that led to the crisis. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opinion/trump-dodd-frank-banks.html">A <em>New York Times</em> op-ed</a>, reflecting on the Trump administration’s intent to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank legislation, concluded that “it is, sadly, safe to say that we can start counting down to the next crisis now.” The Wall Street lobbyist-backed “Financial Choice Act” recently cleared the House of Representatives in June 2017. If it proceeds, it will not only lead to deregulation, but also “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/business/dealbook/house-financial-regulations-dodd-frank.html?mtrref=undefined&amp;gwh=C691FA7F6E07F1030DD85407E45C1811&amp;gwt=pay">eliminate the Labor Department’s fiduciary rule which requires brokers to act in the best interest of their clients when providing investment advice about retirement</a>.” Additionally, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was suffering from budgetary constraints that limited its abilities to detect fraud during the Madoff era, is <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-06/wall-street-cops-reined-in-as-sec-braces-for-trump-budget-cuts">once again preparing for steep cuts</a> under Trump.</p>
<p>If one of the first things we ask about the Madoff Ponzi scheme continues to be “Is he a sociopath?”—and if our thoughts center around whether similar sociopathy unites Madoff and Trump—then we haven’t learned a thing in the ten years. I hate to play Cassandra. But, one of my greatest hopes is that I, and my book, can highlight a vital truth: We’re asking the wrong questions.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=25123&amp;i=Chapter%201.html">Start reading <em>Bernie Madoff and the Crisi</em>s »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio"><br />Colleen P. Eren is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, LaGuardia Community College and author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25123"><em>Bernie Madoff and the Crisis: The Public Trial of Capitalism</em></a>.</p>SociologyStanford University Press2017-07-25T08:00:00-07:00Being a Good Hosthttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/making-space-for-digital-publications.html
Producing and reliably delivering digital scholarship requires a robust hosting platform.<p class="blog-tagline">Producing and reliably delivering digital scholarship requires a robust hosting platform.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by JASMINE MULLIKEN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ec0e9970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ec0e9970b" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ec0e9970b-pi"><img alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-24/9a225175-a0e4-47b0-a4d9-8816bbd0f80e.png" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ec0e9970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ec0e9970b-800wi" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-24/9a225175-a0e4-47b0-a4d9-8816bbd0f80e.png" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ec0e9970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ec0e9970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Server room. CC BY-SA 3.0 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BalticServers_data_center.jpg">via Wikimedia Commons</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>The delivery of a book, from author to press and then press to reader, despite its complexity, is pretty well established. Stanford University Press, for example, has been doing it for <a href="http://www.sup.org/125/">125 years</a>. University presses outside the United States have been doing it for as long as 430 years or better. Much can be streamlined in book production when you have over a century to perfect your processes.</p>
<p>Digital publications, on the other hand, are still in their infancy. And the kinds of digital projects SUP is publishing, which move <a href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/beyond-the-ebook.html">beyond the basic text-centric ebook</a>, are even newer. Although scholars have been creating these kinds of projects for years, only now has any press taken on the challenge and responsibility of advocating this kind of scholarship by publishing it. And part of that process is implementing a plan for delivering the final product to readers.</p>
<p>As many authors of interactive scholarly works know, a project needs a secure and well-maintained hosting environment. For most authors, this environment is one managed by their university, whether by a department or college technology initiative, or a library’s or university’s IT department. These operations are usually fairly well staffed (though rampant nationwide budget cuts to higher education may imperil these assets). But university presses don’t usually have the resources or the need for such dedicated, highly staffed departments. Just as modern presses outsource the physical making and moving (printing, binding, shipping, etc.) of their books, our digital publishing initiative has required that we choose an appropriate hosting provider to manage our growing library of diverse digital publications.</p>
<p class="large-quote">As many authors of interactive scholarly works know, a project needs a secure and well-maintained hosting environment.</p>
<p><br />With all the commercial hosting companies currently in operation, the options seemed virtually endless. Many of them offered the latest standard features like cPanel, WHM, SSD, or HDD options, sliding scales for storage, automatic backups, anywhere from 24/7 to 48-hour-response support, and certificate inclusion. But with names that conjure overweight cattle or marketing campaigns dependent on perpetuating harmful sexist stereotypes, we wanted to look past the corporate farm and find an organization whose purpose and philosophy matched <a href="http://sup.org/about/">the mission of the Press</a>, part of which entails “digital pioneering” and forwarding “creative and sophisticated scholarship.”</p>
<p>Limiting our search to solutions that focused on scholarship, education, and the advancement of knowledge narrowed the field quite a bit. In fact, only one organization seemed to match our values and also offer all the technological needs of our program. <a href="https://reclaimhosting.com/">Reclaim Hosting</a> is a paradoxically small operation (four staff members) that drives an immense and immensely rich sector of the education field (over one hundred institutions). They “provide educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting they own and control.” In other words, one of their driving missions is to provide universities with a system for hosting student and faculty web spaces, where they can build lifelong-accessible projects and portfolios of their work through open-source platforms like Wordpress, Omeka, and many others. They also offer low-cost hosting for scholars to share their work, whether it’s a custom-coded project or a <a href="http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/">Scalar</a> book. In addition to these shared server spaces, Reclaim offers custom built products and services tailored to institutions like ours, whose mission is academic but not necessarily limited to student and faculty web projects.</p>
<p>Our purposes required a lot of space, security, and customization, so when we chose Reclaim and signed the contract, we opted for a dedicated server that would allow us the option of adding storage space as the program grows and a dedicated support team for technical operations, maintenance, and updates. With nearly thirty digital projects in the pipeline, we need a hosting environment that can not only immediately install but also sustain different kinds of platforms, from Scalar to Drupal to Grav to custom-coded websites. And we also need a support team that values our mission and knows the developers of similar missions. Reclaim’s relationship with Scalar, for instance, has already proven invaluable to us as we migrate our first project leveraging that publishing platform into our own hosting environment. Not only am I certain of the quick and knowledgeable support of both Scalar developers and Reclaim owners (yes, the owners handle support tickets), I also know they are talking to each other.</p>
<p class="large-quote">In the field of scholarly communication, the point is to build on each other’s strengths, to collaborate toward a better and more knowledgeable society.</p>
<p><br />Open communication is a very academic value. Too many businesses in the tech industry are closed. They’re in competition with each other and their clients rather than in partnership toward a common goal. But in the field of scholarly communication, the point is to build on each other’s strengths, to collaborate toward a better and more knowledgeable society. Like us, Reclaim is trying something new: offering a focused version of an existing service or framework. For us it’s extending publication to interactive scholarly works. For Reclaim, it’s offering a hosting environment loaded with all the tools digital authors use and bolstered by the support of a team devoted to education and shared knowledge.</p>
<p>We’re under no obligation to promote the company, and there are certainly improvements to be made in any technological infrastructure, but to accurately document our experiences evaluating hosting services, it’s inevitable that we’re going to sound a bit like cheerleaders, at least here at the beginning. But in the roughly three months of our service agreement so far, any glitches I’ve encountered have been fixed with amazing speed. And as we migrate and activate more of the projects in the pipeline, there are sure to be more details to document. Choosing a reliable provider for project delivery is only one step in implementing SUP’s digital publishing program.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Jasmine Mulliken (<a href="https://twitter.com/jasminemulliken">@jasminemulliken</a>) is Digital Production Associate at Stanford University Press. She coordinates the production and workflow of born-digital projects, including recommending platforms and coding standards to authors, consulting with authors on projects’ technical attributes, and evaluating best practices for archiving and preservation.</p>Digital ProjectsStanford University Press2017-07-24T10:21:00-07:00Experimenting with Slave Cureshttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/experimenting-with-slave-cures.html
How was new knowledge tested in the Atlantic World?<p class="blog-tagline">How was new knowledge tested in the Atlantic World?</p>
<p class="author-byline">by LONDA SCHIEBINGER</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90bbb8e970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90bbb8e970b" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90bbb8e970b-pi"><img alt="Bois de fer" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90bbb8e970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90bbb8e970b-800wi" title="Bois de fer" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90bbb8e970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90bbb8e970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">This beautiful plant featured in the “Negro Dr’s” cure for yaws.</span></div>
</div>
<p>An extraordinary experiment pitted purported slave cures against European treatments in Grenada, a small island south of Barbados, in 1773. Plantation owner A. J. Alexander experimented with his “Negro D<sup>r</sup>’s” medical techniques in an effort to cure yaws, a horrid tropical disease infecting the skin, bone, and joints bred of poverty and poor sanitation. When Alexander tested his slave’s cure, what was he actually testing? African cures transported to the Americas? Remedies developed by Amerindians and transmitted to African slaves, who, unlike Europeans, were familiar with what we today call tropical medicine? Cures developed by plantation slaves in the Americas? Or, by some great twist of irony, cures communicated by Europeans to the slaves via the plantation complex?</p>
<p>Alexander considered his slave’s cure for yaws to be part of a body of medical knowledge derived from Africa, referring to the slave’s cures as “Negro Materia Medica.” And, indeed, historians writing about “slave medicine” often assume an African origin of a cure. Did Africans bring medicines and medical techniques with them from their homelands or did they experiment with new plants and cures found in the West Indies? More generally, how did knowledge circulate in the Atlantic World?</p>
<h2 style="margin-left: -40px;">The Circulation of Knowledge in the Atlantic World Medical Complex</h2>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aea0dd970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aea0dd970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aea0dd970d-pi"><img alt="The Circulation of Knowledge in the Atlantic World" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aea0dd970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aea0dd970d-800wi" title="The Circulation of Knowledge in the Atlantic World" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aea0dd970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aea0dd970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">.<em>The Atlantic World medical complex fused African, Amerindian, and European knowledge traditions. </em></span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>Three major routes characterized the dynamic multidirectional trade in people, plants, and medicines between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The European colonial nexus linked Europe and the Americas. The African slave trade nexus joined Africa and the Americas. The Amerindian conquest nexus carried Amerindian knowledge into plantation complexes. The Atlantic World medical complex arose from a fusion of African, Amerindian, and European knowledge traditions. Knowledge of African and Amerindian origins developed in the West Indies shipped along with other cargoes into Europe, often transshipping out again back to the colonies and beyond.</p>
<p>European colonial doctors, enslaved and indigenous peoples avidly collected, cultivated, and tested medicines to create new and, occasionally, effective cures. Yet these healers were not mere medical innovators, but men and women situated in the push and pull of life and death struggles for political, economic, cultural, and personal survival. Some, such as the European doctors and surgeons, were employees of empire—whether private contractors to plantation owners in the British islands or pensioners of the king in the French islands. Others, such as Alexander’s “Negro D<sup>r</sup>,” were enslaved in the plantation complex.</p>
<p>The origin of Alexander’s enslaved man’s cure and its route of transmission exemplify the complexities of the circulation of knowledge in the Atlantic World. The plant at the center of his cure for yaws—the <em>bois fer</em>—is indigenous to the Americas, and data suggest that French doctors collected knowledge of the plant’s use from Amerindians in Saint-Domingue and French Guiana. Yet, if the cure is Amerindian in origin, how did this knowledge circulate to an African doctor in Grenada? Did the slave find African flora he was familiar with again in America? Did he, through trial and error, devise a new cure using an American tree, or did he learn the medicinal uses this plant from the Amerindians or, perhaps, even from the French and then pass the knowledge along to his British owner, Alexander?</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d295c15c970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d295c15c970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27600"><img alt="Secret Cures of Slaves" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d295c15c970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d295c15c970c-800wi" title="Secret Cures of Slaves" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d295c15c970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d295c15c970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27600"><em>Secret Cures of Slaves</em> »</a> examines medicine and human experimentation in the Atlantic World, exploring the circulation of people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.</span></div>
</div>
<p>What we do know is that the flow of knowledge in the Atlantic World was promiscuous and multidirectional, but it did not always move freely. Amerindians and enslaved Africans strategically held much knowledge secret. Bertrand Bajon, French military surgeon and later private physician working in Cayenne, envied the “numerous plant cures” known to “Indians and Negroes,” but remarked that it was impossible to “discover their secrets.” This was particularly true of cures for snakebite, a grave danger in South America.</p>
<p>Bajon was devoted to experimentation, but he could test only those remedies available to him. When one of his slaves was stricken by a snakebite, Bajon resorted to the colonial remedy <em>eau de luce </em>because he could not crack local secrets. He very much regretted that he had not entrusted his slave to an Indian woman in the neighborhood who “always” treated poisonous bites with success. In this case, the new empiricism was thwarted by colonial power struggles, fears, and secrecy. Bajon noted that especially “Negroes” possessed a multitude of cures that they kept secret. He pleaded that trials be made of these “astonishing” remedies—by, he wrote, “persons more educated than are the Negroes.” In a remarkable passage, he noted that a particular “Negro” (unnamed), who was owned by the former governor of Cayenne practiced a successful cure for tetanus made from local plants. But, alas, Bajon could not discover the active ingredient.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The flow of knowledge in the Atlantic World was promiscuous and multidirectional, but it did not always move freely.</p>
<p><br />Alluding to the violence and mistrust endemic to the Atlantic World medical complex, Bajon remarked that much controversy arose concerning slave cures in general and this one in particular. “Many colonists and a great number of Negroes,” he wrote, claimed this tetanus cure to be “infallible,” but, they cautioned, it was enough for a licensed physician or surgeon to prescribe it for it to lose all its value. Physicians, for their part, warned against the remedy and rejected it “without any examination.”</p>
<p>Bajon pleaded that “for the good of humanity” the slave be obliged to “communicate the plants he used and the manner in which they are employed” to some local physicians for testing in the “most impartial” and unprejudiced manner by <em>gens de l’art </em>who sought nothing but the “public good.” This, Bajon proclaimed, was the only “means to know the truth.” In return, Bajon recommended that the slave be offered his freedom—but not until “a great number of experiments confirmed the cure’s virtue.” Bajon was here perhaps thinking of Dr. Papaw in Virginia or, more famously, Graman Quassi, the slave in Suriname, for whom <em>Quassia amara </em>is named and who had won his freedom for revealing his cure.</p>
<p>It is important to keep in mind that knowledge is fragile and often suppressed. Barriers of prejudice, violence, and conquest created agnotological ripples in the Atlantic World. Obeah, healing practices developed by slaves in the British West Indies, provides a prime example of African knowledge that did not circulate throughout the greater Atlantic. Europeans, rather than seeking to understand Obeah, attempted to destroy it. Although they recognized the power of a patient’s state of mind to heal the body, they tended to deride the spiritual aspects prominent in slave healing regimes. Europeans were interested in the material aspects of African healing traditions—the specific herbs or bathing techniques used—but they shied away from the spiritual or mystical aspects of Obeah.</p>
<h2 style="margin-left: -40px;">Agnotological Barriers in the Atlantic World Medical Complex</h2>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2960f35970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2960f35970c" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2960f35970c-pi"><img alt="Agnotological barriers" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2960f35970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2960f35970c-800wi" title="Agnotological barriers" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2960f35970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d2960f35970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">The circulation of medical knowledge in the Atlantic World was blocked by prejudice, enslavement, exile, and the extermination of peoples and their knowledges.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>This is surprising since European physicians understood the potential benefits of what we today call placebos. In 1799, the well-known English physician, John Haygarth, preformed a placebo-controlled trial to understand the role imagination plays in the “cause and cure of disorders of the body” and to unmask the fraud of Elisha Perkins’ tractors—metallic conductors of electricity purported to cure a variety of diseases. European physicians often depended on what they called “medical faith” to enhance the effects of their medicine. In the Caribbean, the British, however, did not often see (or at least did not acknowledge) the continuities between their beliefs and practices and those of Obeah doctors. What was diagnosed as “imagination” in Europeans was judged “superstition” in Africans.</p>
<p class="large-quote">What was diagnosed as “imagination” in Europeans was judged “superstition” in Africans.</p>
<p><br />The fear of Obeah, revolt, and revolution was so great that experiments with electricity were conducted on Obeah men alleged to have instigated Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760. The condemned men were submitted to “experiments” with “electrical machines and magic lanthorns [lanterns].” The report of the experiments noted that these “produced very little effect.” While a strong tradition of experimenting with prisoners condemned to death still prevailed across Europe and its colonies, no results benefitting medicine were recorded from the so-called experiment.</p>
<p>The Atlantic World set in motion people, plants, and medicine from three continents. The very populations West Indian medical men treated—slaves, soldiers, sailors—were created by the political and economic ambitions of European states. And the diseases physicians sought to cure were bred in the mixing and melding of peoples, the disruption of environments, and the squalor of plantations and urban ports. The Atlantic World represents a step in globalization—the potential enrichment of the human experience when worlds collide. But the extinction of people, such as the Amerindians in the Greater Antilles, coupled with the fear and secrecy bred in the enslavement of Africans, carved contours into medical knowledge and practices that continue to shape our world.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University. She is the author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27600"><em>Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World</em></a>, among many other works, including the award-winning, <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674025684&amp;content=reviews"><em>Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World</em></a>.</p>HistoryStanford University Press2017-07-20T08:00:00-07:00Right to Repair is Right to Interprethttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/right-to-repair-is-right-to-interpret.html
As text technologies evolve, so too does the province of literary analysis.<p class="blog-tagline">As text technologies evolve, so too does the province of literary analysis.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by DENNIS TENEN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebef0970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebef0970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebef0970d-pi"><img alt="Circuit board" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebef0970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebef0970d-800wi" title="Circuit board" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebef0970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebef0970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Public domain <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/printed-circuit-board-print-plate-1539113/">via Pixabay</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>How is a tractor like a writing desk?</p>
<p>Some metaphorical insight is to be gained in the comparison between reading and writing, and reaping and sowing. Changes in technology that facilitate physical contact between laborers and their element, be it a blank page or a fallow field, bring farmers and literary scholars into a more direct, non-figurative conversation, concerning the nature of electronic goods.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics.</p>
<p>In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics. Modern tractors like modern typewriters are also computers, which means that these tools now contain an inward facing surface, marked by inscription. Solid-state memory arrays are machined out of silicon, ceramic, palladium, platinum, silver and other precious metals. They are tiny storehouses for information—programming instructions—which ultimately govern the behavior of the mechanism. The presence of such a surface and the capability to respond to its commands is what differentiates &quot;smart&quot; devices from their lackwit counterparts. The smart device, to paraphrase Marx, is one that evolves, out of its silicon brain, grotesque ideas. It is a thing imbued with potential for symbolic manipulation.</p>
<p>It should not surprise us then that protections usually reserved for intellectual property have been expanded to cover such tangible goods as harvesters and combines. In her essay &quot;<a href="https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=912071094074109094070115028092020110000069085067010018086003069122074002022001102121034011107062116011014121092071067003121029015069090069028008067080099118097107077066017083097017069100118067071015081125019102100028071120066118085097089097087120114008&amp;EXT=pdf">Freedom to Tinker</a>,&quot; Pamela Samuelson, of Berkeley Law, described the now infamous attempt by John Deere, a major international maker of agricultural machinery, to restrict access to the innards of its machines, thus severely limiting its customers&#39; ability to repair their own equipment. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and repair.org <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/john-deere-really-doesnt-want-you-own-tractor">have mobilized politically</a>, resulting in &quot;right to repair&quot; bills adopted into law in at least eleven states, including New York and Massachusetts.</p>
<p>These bills are important to me as a literary scholar, because the right to repair implies, physically, the right to read, write, and interpret inscription implicit in all smart devices, including those on our writing desks. Like farmers, all those who read and write at a computer are faced with a threat of critical disempowerment. The practice of literary hermeneutics, the interpretation of texts, in all of its varied traditions, cannot take place when access to inscription is physically curtailed. Think of it as an ultimate form of political censorship, not by decree, but by material design. Solid-state drives are sealed hermetically and therefore hermeneutically.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The right to repair implies, physically, the right to read, write, and interpret inscription.</p>
<p><br />What one sees at the surface of a screen is part of a more complex, laminate figure that extends across surfaces: some near the reader and others remote, inches and sometimes continents away from the site of interpretation. The electronic book in my palm has its origins on servers guarded by armed men in Ohio, Northern Virginia, Mumbai, and São Paulo.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebf37970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebf37970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 200px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821"><img alt="Plain Text" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebf37970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebf37970d-800wi" title="Plain Text" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebf37970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aebf37970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821"><em>Plain Text</em> »</a> reminds us that our devices encode specific modes of governance and control that must remain available to interpretation.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&quot;Literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters,&quot; <a href="http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org/content/25/1/67.full.pdf+html">N. Katherine Hayles wrote in <em>Poetics Today</em></a> more than a decade ago. These words, along with other pioneering works by materially-minded textual scholars—Johanna Drucker, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and Jerome McGann among others—have motivated my approach to writing <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821"><em>Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation</em></a>.</p>
<p>What are the media specifics of text instantiated on digital screens? In answering that question, I have relied on a number of archival sources that point to an intellectual legacy shared between the history of literary thought and the history of modern computing. In this way, I show that the very idea of a Turing machine, crucial to the development of computer science, owes its origins to a series of thought experiments about the nature of textual interpretation in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Elsewhere, I discuss the influence of metaphor theory in the practice of user interface design, as reflected in the thought of Brenda Laurel, Donald Norman, Edwin Hutchins and other proponents of the &quot;direct manipulation&quot; movement, which gave us the familiar &quot;windows,&quot; &quot;folders,&quot; &quot;scroll bars,&quot; and &quot;trash cans&quot; on screen. I show how the very mechanics of cathode ray tube and liquid crystal displays affect the apprehension of digital media, including text, which moves on screen, at the limits of &quot;critical flicker fusion&quot; in excess of 60 times per second, even as it appears to stand still.</p>
<p>What happens when farmers lose the right to handle soil or to fix their tools? What happens to writers who lose touch with pen and page? Can the practice of literary interpretation persist in alienation from the material contexts of knowledge production? These are not theoretical questions, but matters of tactical expediency. The politics of inscription are a matter of grave concern to farmer laborers, software engineers, and textual scholars alike. They require a concerted effort to more closely align our ideals with technologies at hand.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The politics of inscription are a matter of grave concern to farmer laborers, software engineers, and textual scholars alike.</p>
<p><br />The politics of inscription are not simply a matter for academic discussion. In the time that it took me to finish <em>Plain Text</em>, a coalition of US &quot;data dissidents&quot; won a temporary exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act <a href="https://copyright.gov/1201/2014/petitions/Berkman_Center_1201_Initial_Submission_2014.pdf">to allow them to modify their medical implants</a>. It included Hugo Campos, who wanted to access data collected by his Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator, and Benjamin West and Jay Radcliffe who fought for the right to modify their implanted insulin pumps. Marie Moe, of Norway, similarly struggled to rewrite her heart implant&#39;s software. &quot;I want to know what code is running inside of my body,&quot; <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/02/i-want-to-know-what-code-is-running-inside-my-body/">she said</a>. &quot;Medical devices are black boxes,&quot; she continued, &quot;you can&#39;t look into them, there&#39;s no transparency, we don&#39;t know how they work.&quot;</p>
<p>In Pakistan, the American National Security Agency-sponsored Skynet program has placed people on the US-sanctioned &quot;disposition matrix&quot; or &quot;kill list&quot; based on predictive analytics: social network analysis, cellular machine learning, patterns of travel and telephone use. Automated tools with names like SMARTTRACKER, SMARTCHART, and Cloud Travel Analytic <a href="https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=108065093065089082002117069066028067032037017041086025023086013065083081064100015030057099100122006004105112089001007074120064116038000015045096082097064091093120007016053064119113069102078009126082072123099065024112110105072117091067118101096088096&amp;EXT=pdf">select people for target strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles</a>. Our ability to interpret codes that kill on our behalf also stems from our capacity to access them, read, understand, modify, and publish criticism.</p>
<p>Readers everywhere are engaged in a <em>political</em> struggle to control and deploy codified resources. The heart and the sky are sites on which the tactics of inscription are increasingly contested. The right to access the internals of a device is intrinsically related to the right to interpret it. An engaged and literate public requires the ability to keep mechanisms of power in plain view, amendable to commentary and continual interpretation.</p>
<p class="following-excerpt"><em>Parts of this essay have been adapted from </em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821">Plain Text</a><em> by Dennis Tenen</em>.</p>
<p class="author-bio">Dennis Tenen is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is a co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Research Methods in the Humanities. He is the author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821">Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation</a></em>.</p>Culture & Media StudiesLiterary TheoryStanford University Press2017-07-18T08:00:00-07:00Preserving Born-Digital Scholarshiphttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/preserving-scholarship-for-the-digital-age.html
Keeping up with innovation is an added challenge for authors in the digital medium.<p class="blog-tagline">Keeping up with innovation is an added challenge for authors in the digital medium.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by JASMINE MULLIKEN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09afc381970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09afc381970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09afc381970d-pi"><img alt="Floppy disks" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09afc381970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09afc381970d-800wi" title="Floppy disks" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09afc381970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09afc381970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Public domain <a href="http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Computing-Data-Computer-Business-Disk-Black-18320">via Max Pixel</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>One of my first projects as digital production associate for the works being published under <a href="http://www.sup.org/digital/">SUP’s Mellon-funded digital publishing initiative</a> was to create a set of technical guidelines. It has proven to be a complex undertaking and one that is unearthing many philosophical questions and considerations. Over three months of work on these documents, which will be featured here in the coming weeks, has shown that just as a recommendation seems to be complete, something in the technological world changes, and the guidelines need to be updated. It’s the nature of the digital, and it’s something many of us know all too well.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Many authors that compose their work in and for digital environments feel the sting of loss when what they’ve created succumbs to the ruthless speed of technological innovation.</p>
<p><br />The life of a technophile seems to constantly oscillate between elation and grief. The excitement at the birth of a the latest mind-blowing API, elegant publishing platform, lifesaving open source plug-in, or game-changing JavaScript library is inevitably closely followed by the death of another favorite app, well-used software program, or familiar media interface. While the swing keeps us curious and creative, it can also become exhausting and frustrating.</p>
<p>Many authors that compose their work in and <em>for</em> digital environments feel the sting of loss on a personal level when what they’ve created succumbs to the seemingly ruthless speed of technological innovation. Many writers of electronic literature in the 80s and 90s, for instance, felt the pain of changing formats and found their work unreadable as floppy disks were replaced by CDs and operating systems updated to standards that could no longer display the content they had worked so hard to compose.</p>
<p>And for many authors and developers creating interactive scholarly works today, the ebb and flow of innovation and decay can be all the more disorienting within the context of the time that necessarily goes into drafting, proposing, developing, reviewing, revising, and publishing a typical scholarly project. It can easily be the case that just as one stage is nearing completion, an author needs to go back and update a script that has suddenly become buggy or adjust the style sheet because of a platform update.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The life of a technophile seems to constantly oscillate between elation and grief.</p>
<p><br />So it might seem a little strange that despite the rapid pace of technological change, an article written over a decade ago still captures many of the challenges of sustainable web authoring and that its recommendations for mitigating or responding to those challenges are still applicable. Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s 2004 “<a href="https://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html">Acid-Free Bits</a>” still addresses the fundamental challenges of producing digital projects that are preservable, if not sustainable, and offers clear recommendations on “creating long-lasting work.” Though focused on the genre of electronic literature, the information and arguments can easily apply to any web-based work. The authors establish the piece as “a plea for writers to work proactively in archiving their own creations, and to bear these issues in mind even in the act of composition.”</p>
<p>As I began putting together our own guidelines, I couldn’t help noticing that I was repeating many of the same points that Montfort and Waldrip-Fruin brought up so long ago. So as a prelude to the forthcoming release of SUP’s technical guidelines, I recommend revisiting “Acid-Free Bits.” Though, sadly, the larger project it was intended to preface seems to have met the same fate as many early web-focused initiatives, this piece on its own remains a valuable reference for authors of just about every kind of creative or scholarly digital project.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Jasmine Mulliken (<a href="https://twitter.com/jasminemulliken">@jasminemulliken</a>) is Digital Production Associate at Stanford University Press. She coordinates the production and workflow of born-digital projects, including recommending platforms and coding standards to authors, consulting with authors on projects’ technical attributes, and evaluating best practices for archiving and preservation.</p>Digital ProjectsStanford University Press2017-07-17T08:31:44-07:00The Form of Digital Projectshttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/the-form-of-digital-projects.html
Unlike print, the form of digital projects has a direct bearing on the ideas they convey.<p class="blog-tagline">Unlike print, the form of digital projects has a direct bearing on the ideas they convey.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by NICOLE COLEMAN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ac874970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ac874970b" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ac874970b-pi"><img alt="Word Processor" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ac874970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ac874970b-800wi" title="Word Processor" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ac874970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c90ac874970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">A word processor from the 1970s-1980s. Public domain <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CPT_8100_Word_Processor_Desktop_Microcomputer_5185A65A.png">via Wikimedia Commons</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Not too long ago we used word processors to write documents on computers. The act of writing itself was called “word processing.” The excitement around the revolutionary new technology (first electric typewriters, then computer applications) inspired a new name for writing, defined by the instrument with which we produced it. Now&#0160;the technology has become common place and we just&#0160;<em>write</em>&#0160;documents, whether electronic or on paper. The term “word processing” has fallen out of use.&#0160;</p>
<p>So, in another decade, will the long-form, peer-reviewed digital humanities projects, or interactive scholarly works, produced today be known as just&#0160;<em>books</em>? Is it our excitement about the new technological instruments of production that has us searching for a new name? Time will tell. What we know for certain is that this new form of scholarly publication has significant implications for the practices and processes of authoring, publishing, archiving and preservation.</p>
<p class="large-quote">In another decade, will the long-form, peer-reviewed digital humanities projects, or interactive scholarly works, produced today be known as just <em>books?</em></p>
<p><br />Though we may no longer think of ourselves as using word processors when we write with computers, we do pay attention to the format of the electronic documents we create and share. The format, whether .doc, .pdf, .rtf, .md, or one of many others, tells us something about the functionality and interoperability of the electronic file. With digital projects, the form changes everything. Print books published by the Press are usually born-digital—written with the help of a word processor. But, as Jasmine Mulliken explained in her post, &quot;<a href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/beyond-the-ebook.html">Beyond the ebook</a>,” what distinguishes digital projects is the way the argument is tied to the digital form. It is precisely that close link between the form and the argument that presents significant new challenges.</p>
<p>The traditional humanities monograph, destined for print, is a form that is taught beginning in the first year of graduate school. The training in whom to read, whom to cite, and how to write a convincing narrative is so fundamental, so deeply ingrained in the process of becoming a scholar, that it is hardly recognized as method. But new scholarship in emerging digital forms is shining a bright light on method. Digital projects require design and engineering decisions about form that have a direct bearing on the communication of ideas, and yet are not necessarily part of shared disciplinary rhetoric. &#0160;</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ae05b9970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ae05b9970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://enchantingthedesert.com/home/"><img alt="Enchanting the Desert" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ae05b9970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ae05b9970d-800wi" title="Enchanting the Desert" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ae05b9970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ae05b9970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Image from <a href="http://enchantingthedesert.com/home/"><em>Enchanting the Desert</em></a> by Nicholas Bauch, <a href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2015/01/the-digital-pilot.html">Stanford University Press&#39;s first multimodal, born-digital publication</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>A central concern for scholars facing this divide is whether digital humanities work will be valued for promotion and tenure review. The challenge for the department is how to adequately evaluate it without established criteria for review. Much has been written on that topic both from the perspective of the creators of digital projects and the administrators responsible for review. What is often overlooked in those discussions and from the guidelines prepared by professional organizations like the Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Historical Association (AHA) are the implications of the form of the project for its longevity.&#0160;Will the digital project last long enough to make a meaningful contribution to knowledge production?&#0160;</p>
<p>In academic publishing longevity is a question not only for the publisher but also for the library that is expected to make the work accessible and preserve it as long as possible. When the form of the book is an expression of argument, an encoding of method, and is also critical to determining its sustainability, is it the author, the academy, or the publisher who decides which format is acceptable?</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Nicole Coleman is Digital Research Architect at Stanford University Libraries and consults on Stanford University Press’s <a href="http://www.sup.org/digital/">digital publishing initiative</a>.</p>Digital ProjectsStanford University Press2017-07-12T08:00:00-07:00Global Media in the Holy Landhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/global-media-in-the-holy-land.html
From satellite TV to contraband texts, media has played a critical role for Palestinians in Israel.<p class="blog-tagline">From satellite TV to contraband texts, media has played a critical role for Palestinians in Israel.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by MAHA NASSAR</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ac3c20970d" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ac3c20970d photo-full " style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ac3c20970d-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ac3c20970d image-full img-responsive" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-05/b1bf98c5-c992-4b96-93b0-f617186f00b9.png" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ac3c20970d-800wi" alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-07-05/b1bf98c5-c992-4b96-93b0-f617186f00b9.png" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ac3c20970d" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09ac3c20970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Control room of Arabic-language satellite TV channel. Photo by Deirdre Kline, 2008. Public domain (via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Control_room_of_Arabic-language_satellite_TV_channel_Alhurra,_June_2008.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>).</span></div>
</div>
<p>Flip through some of the eight hundred or so Arabic satellite television stations available today, and you’ll find many programs that would look quite familiar to American audiences. On the popular MBC 1 station, you can watch <em>Good Morning Arabs</em> and <em>Arab Idol</em>, both of which are produced and hosted in Arabic, but have formats nearly identical to those of their American counterparts. Programming on MBC 4 would look even more familiar, with popular American shows like <em>Project Runway</em> and CBS’s <em>The Talk</em> broadcast in English with Arabic subtitles. The programs’ sidestepping of political sensitivities and frequent product placement exemplify the commercialized, corporatized global media that has come to the Arab world in recent decades.</p>
<p>But there is another type of global media, one with a longer and more interesting history. Long before satellite television and the internet became the primary modes of communication and entertainment in the region, written texts, especially books, newspapers, and journals, were being hand-copied, printed, sold, mailed, and smuggled across geographic and political divides. Far from being commercialized entertainment, this written media was utilized by political organizers and intellectuals to subvert official state narratives, challenge government policies, and connect otherwise isolated peoples to one another.</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29352e1970c" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29352e1970c photo-full " style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23697"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29352e1970c img-responsive" title="Brothers Apart" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29352e1970c-800wi" alt="Brothers Apart" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29352e1970c" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d29352e1970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23697"><em>Brothers Apart</em> »</a>&nbsp;reveals how Palestinian intellectuals forged transnational connections through written texts</span></div>
</div>
<p><br />In my book, <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23697">Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World</a></em>, I uncover the story of how globally circulated written media helped Palestinian citizens of Israel overcome their deep isolation during the 1950s and ’60s. Relegated to a second-class status in the newly established Jewish state, for nearly two decades they were controlled by a military regime that restricted their movement, limited their political expression, and cut them off from friends and relatives on the other side of the 1949 Armistice Line (also known as the Green Line).</p>
<p>In this environment, intellectuals, party organizers, and writers sought to connect to the Arab region and the decolonizing world through poetry, journalism, fiction, and nonfiction. Members of the Israeli Communist Party, for example, drew on their contacts abroad to access English translations of socialist humanist discourses, including the works of such well-known international leftist writers as Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nazim Hikmet, and Langston Hughes. Party members then translated these works into Arabic and published them in their party’s local newspaper and journal, extending the reach of these writings to other Palestinians (and Arabic-speaking Jews) in Israel.</p>
<p>While the joint Arab-Jewish make-up of the Israeli Communist Party helped facilitate access to global leftist writings, achieving even a basic connection to the Arab world proved to be much more difficult. Citing their potential for “incitement,” Israeli military officials deemed the unauthorized possession of Arabic publications by Palestinian citizens to be subversive. That, coupled with the official Arab boycott of Israel, meant that Palestinian intellectuals in Israel had to go to great lengths to obtain newspapers, journals, poetry collections and other contemporary writings from the Arab world. Some asked friends in Europe to mail them copies of back issues of Arabic periodicals. University students took advantage of their library’s Arabic collections, which they then copied by hand and shared with friends and colleagues. Their determination to connect to Arab intellectual, political and cultural discourses belied the widespread belief in the region at the time that they were content “Arab Israelis” who had turned their backs on their people’s struggles.</p>
<p>But Palestinians in Israel were not just consuming these discourses, they were drawing on them for inspiration. Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Emile Habibi, and many others wrote literary and journalistic pieces in the local Arabic press in which they condemned the discrimination they faced at home and displayed a thorough engagement with topics related to cultural and political decolonization. Their published works played a key role in fostering a shared national consciousness among Palestinians in Israel that linked them to the region and to the decolonizing world.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Palestinian intellectuals in exile utilized written media to alert Arabs to the defiance of their fellow Palestinians inside the Green Line.</p>
<p><br />At the same time, Palestinian intellectuals in exile also utilized written media to alert Arabs to the defiance of their fellow Palestinians inside the Green Line. They smuggled Arabic newspapers and journals out of Israel into their countries of residence, and they wrote about the moving and defiant poetry being composed behind the barbed wire. Their calls initially fell on deaf ears, but the massive Arab defeat of the June 1967 War forced intellectuals in the region to reassess their previously held assumptions, especially about Israel. As a result, they revisited—and republished—the literary and journalistic works by Palestinians in Israel that they had previously ignored. The raised profile of these works also led them to be translated into multiple languages, furthering their reach even more. Thus, written media also served as a central means of alerting the world to the conditions—and to the resistance—of this otherwise sequestered community.</p>
<p>Since then Palestinians in Israel have become much more integrated into the collective Palestinian national consciousness, and their visibility in the Arab world has gradually increased as well. Darwish is one of the most lauded poets of the Arab world and has received widespread international acclaim, while other Palestinian poets and novelists from inside the Green Line have likewise received much regional and international praise.</p>
<p>Palestinians in Israel are also taking advantage of the more recent developments in global media platforms to share their stories and experiences with the world. In June 2015, the Musawa channel was launched, making it the first Arabic satellite channel dedicated to giving a voice to this community. As part of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation, Musawa (which means “equality” in Arabic) is beamed—and streamed—to millions of homes in the region and around the world. Aware of their potential reach, Musawa’s hosts are keen to draw attention to the ongoing discrimination the Palestinian minority faces while also highlighting the many grassroots efforts aimed at empowering their community and fostering pride in their Palestinian culture and heritage.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Palestinians in Israel are also taking advantage of the more recent developments in global media platforms to share their stories and experiences with the world.</p>
<p><br />Even the commercialized global media outlet MBC has provided an opportunity for some Palestinians in Israel to reach a broader audience. Several of them have competed in the massively popular <em>Arab Idol</em>&nbsp;singing competition over the past few years, and one of them, Ameer Dandan, was a finalist in the latest season.</p>
<p>In an era where satellite dishes and internet feeds provide endless viewing options, and where written texts can be tweeted, posted and shared around the world at lightning-speed, it is tempting to take for granted the ease with which we access global media outlets today. But we would do well to appreciate the lengths that earlier generations of intellectuals and activists had to go to in order to access news and views beyond their borders. And at a time in which Arabs are often dismissed in Western circles as being out of touch with the rest of the world, we would also do well to remember that they know much more about our media landscape than we know about theirs.<br /><br /></p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=23697&amp;i=Introduction.html">Start reading <em>Brothers Apart</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio"><br />Maha Nassar is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23697">Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World</a></em>.</p>Culture & Media StudiesHistoryMiddle East StudiesStanford University Press2017-07-06T08:00:00-07:00Beyond the ebookhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/beyond-the-ebook.html
As scholarship and technology evolve, the question of how to define born-digital work arises.
<p class="blog-tagline">As scholarship and technology evolve, the question of how to define born-digital work arises.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by JASMINE MULLIKEN</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aabe2f970d" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aabe2f970d photo-full " style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aabe2f970d-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aabe2f970d image-full img-responsive" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-06-30/78733bfc-f568-4bae-a01d-1e10d561c650.png" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aabe2f970d-800wi" alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-06-30/78733bfc-f568-4bae-a01d-1e10d561c650.png" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aabe2f970d" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09aabe2f970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Public domain <a href="https://pixabay.com/p-1632909/?no_redirect">via Pixabay</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Part of any publisher’s production workflow is registering published items with identifiers of various kinds. For traditional books these identifiers includes things like ISBNs and other cataloging descriptors like OCLC numbers and Library of Congress call numbers. With the advent of digitized texts came the addition of Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs. Assigning all these identifiers involves metadata, which inevitably means defining the publication’s format type. Definition is easy when a format has been widely understood, accepted, produced, and circulated for centuries. The process of cataloging and registering books is pretty streamlined for most publishers. Even assigning identifying information to ebooks, a much newer format, has become pretty routine. But digital projects like the ones we’re publishing, which are inherently multimodal and web-based, offer an entirely new and somewhat perplexing set of challenges.</p>
<p>A recent discussion I had with a DOI registering agency was a reminder that the organizations and entities that publishers work with on a regular basis don’t yet understand that what we at SUP are publishing, and what other publishers will inevitably be adding to their programs, is very different from what’s already out there. So it’s worth taking a moment to establish what distinguishes our digital publications from other kinds of digital publications, like ebooks, that seemingly have none of these challenges of definition surrounding them.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Digital projects like the ones we’re publishing, which are inherently multimodal and web-based, offer an entirely new and somewhat perplexing set of challenges.</p>
<p></p>
<p><br />The projects we’re publishing under the terms of our Mellon grant are very different from the typical electronic book. When you read an ebook, you scroll or swipe pages. You click links to an index or maybe even external content. Perhaps you annotate passages or jump directly to a chapter from the clickable table of contents. Sure, it’s interactive, and sure, it’s digital; but in general, the content and arguments are structured the same way they’d be structured in a traditional book. In most cases, the author of such a project works with essentially the same tools as the author of a traditional book when they’re composing their text. And in many cases, what the reader is interacting with on the screen is in effect a digitized text though it may also include images, sound, and other media. In essence, I would argue it’s a printable text delivered in a digital environment that accommodates the practice of traditional reading slightly augmented by technological conveniences. But not much of the content would be lost if a reader chose to print out the text. And that’s fine.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">More than simply remediated books, the projects we are publishing are born-digital, multimodal, long-form works of scholarship.</p>
<p>But the projects we’re publishing are something entirely different. More than simply remediated books, the projects we are publishing are born-digital, multimodal, long-form works of scholarship whose fundamental arguments are contingent upon digital media. They rely on the networks and interfaces through which they are delivered. They offer non-linear or multi-linear perspectives. They invite a variety of ways to perceive, interpret, use, and experience the material through architectures that often don’t privilege a primary method of navigation. The media is not simply an accessory or an example—the media is the argument. (Must … resist … channeling … <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message">McLuhan</a>….) The content of such projects could never be simply printed out without losing a major part of its essence and effect. Whereas an ebook can be downloaded as a single static file and still function as a linear self-contained text, the work we’re publishing needs the medium in which it’s delivered to the reader. It needs the operating system powering the browser powering the rendering of JavaScript or HTML or CSS. To take the work out of its environment—to rebind it, as it were—would be to remove half of what the author created. The author is writing more than the argument and the text—she is writing the functionality of the object itself.</p>
<p>Which brings us back to the production process. While we’re not spending quite as much time as we would with a traditional monograph on building the book as an object, we’re putting a lot more into negotiating definitions and having conversations with all those organizations and agencies that put the identifiers and descriptors on these new publication formats. Is it enough to use the schemas and rubrics for the typical book? We think not, and we hope authors, librarians, catalogers, and other presses who are publishing or hope to publish these new formats will join us in pushing the descriptive boundaries.</p>
<p>Scholarly discourse evolves. Formats evolve. So should the language that classifies their relationship. Scholarly digital projects are as valuable as any book published by an academic press and deserve a place in the scholarly economy.&nbsp;Identifying them correctly is a necessary part of that evolution.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Jasmine Mulliken (<a href="https://twitter.com/jasminemulliken">@jasminemulliken</a>) is Digital Production Associate at Stanford University Press. She coordinates the production and workflow of born-digital projects, including recommending platforms and coding standards to authors, consulting with authors on projects’ technical attributes, and evaluating best practices for archiving and preservation.</p>Digital ProjectsStanford University Press2017-07-05T08:00:00-07:00Hard Luck and a Dose of Pluckhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/06/hard-luck-and-a-dose-of-pluck.html
A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.<p class="blog-tagline">A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.</p>
<p class="author-byline">a Q&amp;A with LIA BROZGAL and SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fe81970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fe81970c" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fe81970c-pi"><img alt="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-06-28/f160b8bc-7b71-4583-a2f2-d1e2f5af05c0.png" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fe81970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fe81970c-800wi" title="image from https://s3.amazonaws.com/feather-client-files-aviary-prod-us-east-1/2017-06-28/f160b8bc-7b71-4583-a2f2-d1e2f5af05c0.png" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fe81970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fe81970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">A young Jewish woman in Sfax. Source: <em>Géographie pittoresque et monumentale des colonies françaises: Tunisie</em>. Paris: Flammarion, 1906.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Published in Tunis in 1938, <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27490"><em>Ninette of Sin Street</em></a> is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French and is now available in English for the first time. The story peers up at colonial society from the gutter, rather than down from the balcony of high politics. It is about ordinary, everyday life and, as such, is a study in power relations as they took shape on the ground and in the street, amidst the intricacies of French colonial rule, religious difference, and class discrepancy. This volume offers the first English translation of Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. Professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors to the English edition, answer some of our questions about the novella below.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Who and what is the story of <em>Ninette of Sin Street</em> about?</span></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>LIA BROZGAL:</strong></span><em> Ninette</em> tells the story of its titular protagonist, Ninette, a young Jewish woman living in the town of Sfax in the 1930s—a period during which Tunisia was under French rule. Ninette, as we learn, has grown up in poverty; she is an orphan making her way in a complicated, harsh world; she is destitute and has sometimes resorted to prostitution for a few coins. She is also the single mother of a little boy named Israel. Her primary concern, when the novella opens, is getting her son enrolled in the local Jewish school so that he can learn a trade and become, as Ninette says “honorable.” As she recounts her travails—always with a dose of pluck—we travel with her from the poor district of Sfax to Tunis, the capital, and back again as Ninette makes her way in the world.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">How does the author, Vitalis Danon, characterize and portray Ninette?</span></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>LIA BROZGAL:</strong></span> Ninette’s story is certainly compelling in and of itself. But the novella’s structure and voice are remarkable for its time. Danon chose to allow Ninette to speak in the first person, to allow a female character to tell her story in what he imagined to be her own words and her own way of seeing the world. The result is a series of monologues: each time Ninette stopped by the Jewish school to check on her son’s progress, she would sit and chat with the principal, recounting the next episode in her life of hard luck.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">We might understand this as a kind of “confessional,” or even psychotherapeutic structure: Ninette does not hold back in what she tells the principal (and of course, the reader), but she does often try to soften her stories by using euphemisms or coded language to describe episodes from her life that she is embarrassed to recount.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">Danon’s Ninette is candid, colorful, and full of pithy observations about human nature, the rabbinate, and motherhood. She is not educated, but she is smart as a whip. The principal only speaks at the very end of the tale; his silence over the course of the novella gives Ninette free reign over the story, and the result is one of Tunisian literature’s strongest female voices.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What does Danon’s novella reveal about Tunisia under French colonial rule?</span></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN:</strong></span> So much of what we know of colonial North Africa is told through the perspective of colonial and military officials, or local elites. Ninette is an entirely different heroine—poor, long down on her luck, a single mother, a sometimes prostitute, a spunky woman hoping for a better life for her son—and it is not surprising that she offers an entirely fresh view of colonial society. Ninette’s preoccupations are not with colonialism as it was crafted on high, or strategically navigated by the wealthy, but with the day-to-day barriers that stand in her (and her son’s) way: the challenges of finding a safe place to live, putting food on the table, educating her bastard son Israel, shedding the taboo of a past life, coping with sexual violence. Her story gives lie to the fantasy of the “civilizing project,” which favored some and pinioned others, and (nevertheless) which certain right wing forces in France trumpet as a success story to this very day. It also nuances what we know of North African Jews’ story of French colonial rule, adding a forgotten dimension of class and gender to a larger story.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Who was Vitalis Danon and how did he come to be a writer in Tunisia?</span></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN:</strong></span> Born in Ottoman Edirne (a city in what is now the northwest of Turkey), Danon was educated by the <em>Alliance israélite universelle</em>, a Franco-Jewish philanthropy that created a network of Jewish, secular schools across the Mediterranean and Middle East in the decades that bracketed the turn of the twentieth century. An intelligent and ambitious student, he went to Paris upon graduation to be trained as an <em>Alliance</em> teacher in the organization’s elite teacher training college. Danon was but twenty years old when he was assigned to his first post, in Sfax, Tunisia. Sfax was a small port town relative to Edirne, and home to a Jewish community that was mostly Arabophone (rather than composed of speakers of Judeo-Spanish, as were most Jews in Edirne). Upon arrival, he wandered the town with Orientalist delight, writing back to his supervisors in Paris of the smells, tastes, and mores of the <em>shuk</em> (marketplace). Yet with time, Danon would grow to accept Tunisia as his home, living there for some five decades, marrying a local Jewish woman, raising his children in the country. All the while, he worked for the <em>Alliance</em> indefatigably, chafing against their parsimonious allocations, surviving the German occupation and Allied bombardment. He also came of age as a writer in Tunisia, shaping, with but a few other colleagues, a pioneering school of literature known as the “Tunis School.”</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What was “The Tunis School” and what characterized the writings of this group?</span></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>LIA BROZGAL:</strong></span> The Tunis School, or <em>l’école de Tunis</em>, was a group of writers all of whom were teachers in the Tunisian schools founded and maintained by the <em>Alliance israélite universelle</em> (AIU). Danon served in AIU schools in both Sfax and in Tunis, and it was while he was in the capital that he met fellow teachers Jacques Véhel and Raphaël Levy (known by the pseudonym RYVEL). All three men had literary aspirations, and their common projects were often inspired by their students—the poor Jewish children who lived in the <em>hara</em> (or Jewish quarter). Among their co-authored works we find <em>Le bestiaire du ghetto</em> (<em>The Ghetto Bestiary</em>) and<em> La hara conte: folklore judéo-tunisien</em> (<em>The Hara Recounts: Judeo-Tunisian Folklore</em>). Little has been written about this group, yet they offer a very interesting study in a particular variety of orientalism: although they all hailed from the putative “orient” (Danon from the Ottoman Empire, Véhel and RYVEL from Tunisia), their education separated them from the local, indigenous Jews. And as a result, perhaps, their writing on the Tunisian Jews is infused with what can be read as an orientalist tone—they call the Jewish quarter a “ghetto,” for example, and they underscore the exotic “strangeness” of their Tunisian brethren. To date, <em>Ninette of Sin Street</em> is the only work by a Tunis School writer that has been translated into English.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Why was it important to translate Danon’s novella into English?</span></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN:</strong></span> Though we come from different academic disciplines (Lia, French and Francophone literature, Sarah, History) we have both struggled to find texts in English that convey the dynamism of everyday life in colonial North Africa, the diversity of Jewish culture in the Maghreb and Middle East, and, particularly, that offer a woman’s perspective (even if a fictional woman’s perspective) on the world around them. <em>Ninette</em> offered an ideal cocktail of these ingredients. Additionally, we both fell in love with Ninette’s sass and zeal, her easy blending of rabbinical teachings, local slang, and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality. Knowing that Jane Kuntz was uniquely skilled at bringing Ninette’s spirit to English faithfully sealed the deal—it was a collaboration among four women that was too good to resist!</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What is it about Ninette’s story that remains important today?</span></p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>LIA BROZGAL:</strong></span> Initially, <em>Ninette of Sin Street</em> was important to me for literary reasons. It represents one of the very first works of French-language literature to emerge from Tunisia. (A tradition that has been carried on by writers like Albert Memmi—who was also a pupil at the AIU schools). It seemed worthy of note that Tunisian literature in French began with a story about a poor Jewish woman who knew how to speak for herself. Francophone literature (French-language literature from outside the mainland) tends not to feature many Jewish writers or characters, yet there were historically significant Jewish communities in many of the areas affected by French colonization.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fea2970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fea2970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 200px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27490"><img alt="Ninette of Sin Street" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fea2970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fea2970c-800wi" title="Ninette of Sin Street" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fea2970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d290fea2970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27490"><em>Ninette of Sin Street</em> »</a>&#0160;is both a classic rags-to-riches tale and a subtle, incisive critique of French colonialism. </span></div>
</div>
<p>As I began teaching <em>Ninette</em> (first in the original French), Ninette’s story came alive for me as a fascinating document of a particular time, but also as a critical narrative. Embedded in Ninette’s autobiographical monologue are critiques of the status quo, of religious institutions, of structural imbalances. The reader can decide for herself whether the novella celebrates or castigates the AIU and its mission; at the end, we all agree that the text complicates questions about the colonial project and minority religions.</p>
<p>Ninette’s story is also worth remembering in contemporary Tunisia. The multicultural, multilingual Tunisia described in <em>Ninette</em> may be a thing of the past, but that past is not so distant—and, indeed, contains timely lessons from Sin Street.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN:</strong></span> The Jewish community of Tunisia numbered roughly 200,000 at the end of the Second World War. After massive out-migration, the community today is minuscule, though Jews from Tunisia (and the next generation of descendants) continue to visit for pleasure and for holidays, to conduct business, and to reunite with friends. If one takes the long historical view, Ninette of Tunisia’s Sin Street is indeed a figure of the past. Ninette reminds us that the urban streets of North Africa once teemed with different forms of diversity than they do today, including the visible, active presence of Jews. What remains a constant—and what makes Ninette so contemporary a protagonist—is the challenge of poverty, the ingenuity of women, and that universal drive to see the next generation inherit a fairer, more just world.<br /><br /></p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=27490&amp;i=Excerpt.html">Start reading <em>Ninette of Sin Street</em> »</a><br /><br /></p>
<p class="author-bio">Lia Brozgal is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of <em><a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803240421/">Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory</a></em>, co-editor of <em><a href="https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/59871">Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today</a></em>, and co-editor, with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, of <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=27490">Ninette of Sin Street</a></em>, a novella by Vitalis Danon, translated by Jane Kuntz.</p>
<p class="author-bio">Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Her recent books include <em><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo23467691.html">Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century</a></em>, <em><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo17607580.html">Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria</a>,<a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=18555"> Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950</a>, </em>and co-editor, with Lia Brozgal, of <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=27490">Ninette of Sin Street</a></em>, a novella by Vitalis Danon, translated by Jane Kuntz.</p>Jewish StudiesLiterary TheoryMiddle East StudiesStanford University Press2017-06-28T08:18:36-07:00